President Bush signed a 6-year, $286.4 billion highway bill on Wednesday, ending a long debate between Congress and the White House and putting into place a permanent highway bill for the first time since September 2003. The old bill was extended six times as both sides debated spending amounts and special projects; the Senate originally [...]

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A Canadian Federal Court judge has ruled that intelligence authorities must stop interrogating Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr . Justice Konrad von Finckenstein's decision also slammed Canadian counterterrorism agents for gathering information at a place where he claims Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been violated. Khadr has admitted killing a US medic while [...]

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Protesters in cities across Asia Wednesday urged government officials in Japan to apologize for the actions of the Imperial Army and compensate women forced into sexual slavery in brothels run by the Japanese military before and during WWII. The nearly 200,000, mostly Korean sex slaves known as "comfort women" have received some apologies from the [...]

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Pakistan's chief election commissioner Abdul Hameed Dogar Wednesday promised to take swift and severe action against anyone prohibiting women from accessing polls in next week's local government elections. Dogar said he would go so far as to cancel results in areas where women were barred from casting votes. The statements come after the country's North [...]

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Russian Federal Prisons Service director Yuri Kalinin said Wednesday that the transfer of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to a larger cell with more inmates was "normal prison procedure" and not a form of punishment. Lawyers for Khodorkovsky said earlier this week that he had been denied access to newspapers and television and moved to [...]

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